Issue 1 Page 1 pencils done. (When I have three pages of story, and thus a
three week "backlog," I plan to officially launch the comic.)

Issue 1 Page 1 inks done. Scanning and colors to come.

Issue 1 Page 2 layouts in progress.

Issue 1, Page 1 scanning and colors done.

Issue 1, Page 2 layouts done. Pencils in progress.

Page 2 Pencils done. (Get the inks on this one and do one more to launch.)

Page 2, Inks done. (Colors and one more page to launch.)

Page 2 finished. One more to launch.

Page 3 pencils and inks finished.

Signup on Keenspace (coldservings.keenspace.com) complete, now waiting for
them to provide me with the account.

www.coldservings.com
registered. Will see about getting it pointed at the keenspace account
when I have that.

We are go for launch!

Figures, since I come into this primarily as a writer, I'm much farther ahead
on the "writing" side than on the "drawing" side.

Tom Merrick, the Cold Servings Vigilante:

Questions about the series

Q: What is (or will be) Cold Servings?

A: Cold Servings will be a superhero webcomic set in a very close
match to the "real world." Actually "masked vigilante" may
be a better term than "superhero" since there will be no "super
powers." Physics and technology will be either doable with present
technology or at least plausibly within sight. Another way to look at it is
diamond hard science fiction set in an extremely near future but with a
"superhero" theme.

Q: Why this comic?

A: When I was growing up the Superhero comic book was a significant
part of my reading. I wanted to be a superhero, not for fame so much as to
be able to do things that really made a difference in the world. Well, I
grew up, got responsible, learned about things like Newton's Laws of Motion and
the laws of Thermodynamics (which, between them, eliminate much of what goes on
in comic books), got a job, family, and demands on my time and energy. No
superheroing for me. But there remains, buried inside me, that little kid
who never outgrew the desire. Conventional wisdom is that it can't work,
not in the real world. Even more, conventional wisdom is that even if one
were able to become a "successful" superhero, it would be a bad
idea. The negatives far outweigh any possible positives from someone going
into freelance accident/disaster rescue and law enforcement.

I'm not so certain. There is a lot to be said for the conventional
view, but rarely either complete or totally accurate. The world tends to
offer too much wiggle room for most absolutes. It's this wiggle room that
I'd like to explore in fiction.

Q: Why a comic? Why not prose like your previous fiction?

The short answer, is I wanted to write/draw comics for some time and this is
more opportunity than need. However that's not the only
consideration. Superhero stories have generally been told in the medium of
comics so there's the element of tradition.

The following questions refer to problems/challenges in creating the
comic Cold Servings. This is kind of a ramble.

Q: What kind of abilities can the hero have?

A: The first rule is "no superpowers." That means my main character
can't do anything "ordinary" people can't do. No leaping 15 feet
in the air, lifting cars straight overhead, inventing super-technological
gadgets overnight, dodging bullets, or any of that. Nor can he be a world
class athlete in multiple fields and the knowledge of multiple science and
engineering degrees. I can make him reasonably strong (say, lift 2-300 lbs
overhead), a reasonably fast runner (5 minute miles, held over 3-5 miles), and
just overall in good shape.

Q: How about Martial Arts training?

A: Absolutely. However, it's not like you see in the movies, where the
trained martial artist wades through hordes of untrained criminals. In
real life, the bad guys have guns, knives, and other weapons that work a lot
better against the "good guys" than would appear from the
movies. In addition those nice weapon disarms taught in martial arts
classes are a lot less effective in reality than the classroom situation would
lead one to believe. (Try a "gun disarm" against somebody with a
paintball pistol and see if you can really avoid getting shot or try a
"knife disarm" against somebody armed with a piece of sidewalk chalk
and look for the marks where you got "cut.")

I think the key here is going to be weapons. More on that later.

Q: If guns are so effective, why not use them, like Bronson in Death
Wish?

A: My goal here is a "comic book superhero" not an
"action movie vigilante." And so, one of the nods I'm making to the
superhero genre is the hero's "I don't kill" attitude. There are
practical reasons for this. One is that my hero wants to differentiate
himself from the people he goes after. This is one major way.
Another is that if he went around killing those he considered the "bad
guys" catching him would suddenly become a lot higher priority with the
police. He's going to have enough trouble without adding "wanted for
murder" to it. Of course, he'll still be vilified by both police and
media anyway. Look at how people are often characterized after acting in
legitimate self defense.

All of that is why I've been leaning toward Filipino Martial Arts with its
systems of stick fighting. That, plus some "inventive" gadgetry
will do for the offense. On the defensive side, body armor will definitely
be part of his equipment.

Q: So what about these gadgets?

A: This is an area that it can be really tempting to "cheat"
on. But those laws of motion and thermodynamics still apply.
Imagine, for instance, a gadget that shoots a line up to the roof of a building
then reels in the line to lift the hero up. If the character and his
equipment weighs about 250 lbs (113 kg), it will take on the close order of 5 hp
to lift the character one story (call it 10 feet or 3 meters) per second.
That's a lot of power to pack into a portable item. Getting both the power
source (such as batteries) and the drive motors for the unit into a compact
enough unit to carry easily is not easy. 5 hp electric motors are not, in
general, small. Then there's the amount of volume the line itself would
take (get a couple hundred feet of rope strong enough to safely support a
person's weight to see). Yet the idea is so cool, and seems to tantalizingly
plausible, that it's easy to justify giving it to the hero anyway. That's
exactly the kind of cheat I want to avoid. So, until I can figure out some
way to do it well enough that someone could actually build the gadget and make
it work, my character doesn't have it.

The gadgets he'll have will be more along the lines of things like night
vision goggles, shotgun microphones and other listening equipment, rather
ordinary (and nondescript, by design) vehicles, radio scanners and so
forth. A few other things will be items pressed into alternate uses.
One example would be combining a couple of high intensity photoflash units into
a "blinder" for night time use. Pop off that bright flash in a
dark situation--the hero's eyes are shielded during the instant the light's
going off--and for a few seconds the hero's the only one who can see.
Maybe build an electric "stun gun" into the outfit so that the
electrodes are in the finger tips. Tag, you're zapped.

Q: It seems pretty clear that the hero will have to have a secret
identity.

A: Yup. And that's another challenge. Most "secret
identities" in comics wouldn't stay secret very long against any determined
investigation in the real world. As just one example, consider any hero
with an aircraft. Unless you have complete invisibility, silence,
undetectability by radar, etc., it won't be long before people know the general
area where the airplane takes off and lands. Another example, there's no
way that any superhero detained, questioned, or arrested by the police would not
be unmasked, fingerprinted and any other identifying characteristics labeled and
traced. Likewise, try on some superhero costume masks sometime and see how
well they hide your identity from people who know you.

For the secret identity to work, there are certain things that have to be
different from what are common in comic books. First off, the
"civilian identity" has to be, essentially, a "nobody" no
wealthy socialites or news anchors whose faces are known by large numbers of
people. Can't have a fixed base for vehicles. Disguise should, in
some way, alter body shape (pad out certain areas, snug in others, maybe
something like lifts in the shoes to make the person taller) and should
completely cover head and face. Should also include some kind of voice
altering unit.

Some other serious secret identity issues.

If the hero is ever taken by the police, it's over. I've tried to
figure out some way (overlays or something) to mask fingerprinting, but
everything I've come up with is detectable and, therefore, defeatable.
And short of being somebody else, what can you do to defeat DNA testing?

If the hero ever gets taken down by the bad guys its also over. It's
not like in the comic books. Even if they don't kill the hero
outright, he will be unmasked.

If the hero is ever injured and leaves blood behind at an incident,
there's that DNA testing again. This is not, necessarily, a problem in
itself so long as no DNA samples are recorded to match it against.

If the hero is ever injured in an incident and requires medical
treatment. Explaining a knife or gunshot wound might be a little
difficult.

Where to change into hero getup. People would eventually notice the
strangely garbed figure going in and out of an apartment or house, never
mind the jet powered car in the parking lot.

Q: What are come common superhero tropes that just won't work in this
series?

A: A lot of stuff from the comics won't work in reality (and,
therefore, in this series):

Leaping over attacksLook, when you jump, from the moment your feet leave the ground to the time
they touch it again, you have no control over your trajectory. Your motion
is entirely predictable. While a good jumper might be able to get the
height (requiring lifting the center of gravity about 1 meter), the "hang
time" would be just under a second. That's a long time in a fight, a
long time where the jumper would be extremely vulnerable.

Leaping from rooftop to rooftopUnless the buildings are extremely close together and all of the same
height, this just isn't going to happen. Even if you make the jump
horizontally, a one story drop (target building is one floor lower than start
building) is enough to break bones if you don't land right. For a given
vertical drop, falling straight down is the least damaging way to fall.
Any horizontal motion before hitting simply adds to the total energy and
momentum that must be absorbed. Even if the rooftops are the same height,
try this experiment. On the ground next to a building, run parallel to its
wall toward a corner. Just before you reach the corner of the building,
leap as hard and as far as you can. Note where you touch down to the
ground: is it before or after you pass the corner of the next
building. If it's before, you just died. Now do it again and again
and again. How long before your legs turn to warm molasses?

Swinging on a rope as a practical means of travel.Look above for the bit about the bulk of a rope that can safely support a
person's weight. Then there's the problem of having something to attach
the rope to, getting it attached while in motion, getting it released at the
appropriate time in the swing, and finding the next attachment point, all on the
fly. Miss once and you die. Then just consider the sheer physical
effort involved. Go out sometime and just hang from a rope with your
hands. See how long you can hold on. Remember that any actual
swinging will increase the amount of force involved. Now since, in the
comics, characters often hold onto the line with one hand while doing something
with the other try the same exercise one-handed. I won't even get into the
part where the thing they're doing with the other hand is carrying another
person. Nope, no rope swinging here.

Q: I've gone my entire life without ever even witnessing a crime.
Yet those guys in comics are always running into them? How does our hero
find crimes to intervene in?

A: That's actually one of the more challenging issues. The odds
of any one individual "running into" a crime at any given time are
pretty slim. I'd like to find out how often police, who are out looking
for crimes, actually come across crimes in progress. However, I do have an
approach for how the hero here will go about searching for crime.

The story is set in Indianapolis. That's where I live and am most
familiar with. There's also a Police
Incident Report Viewer available online. In it, criminal activity is
divided into three categories: "offenses against persons,"
"property offenses" and "other incidents."

Since Our Hero is most interested in violent crime, I went through and
collected all the offenses against persons for a typical month (I chose
September 2004 as my representative month). The more serious offenses
(aggravated assault, rape, homicide, kidnapping, etc.) were then plotted on a
mat to find the "hot spots" in town where the most crime of that
nature happened in the smallest areas.

Next, I chose one of the "hot spots" and began accumulating all the
crime for that hotspot over the course of a year into a master
spreadsheet. I filtered out crimes where Our Hero really couldn't do
anything even if he were there--missing persons, arrests on warrants, etc.--and
then did a "pivot table" with the number of incidents plotted against
time of day and day of the week. So now he knows where crime happens the
most and when.

The next step will be to determine how much time he spends
"patrolling" (I'll need to figure out what his weekly schedule is for
that) and given the size of the area, the frequency of crimes within the area,
and how much time he's there, I should be able to figure out how frequently he
can expect to be in the vicinity when a crime happens.

(Jan 29, 04) And we've got the results
from this. Using very close to the best case, Our Hero can only expect, on
average, to be in the vicinity of a crime, of a type that he can intervene in,
as it's happening, once in three months. Hardly enough to make for an
exciting comic book. He's going to have to find some way of being able to
"cover" a wider area at any given time. The rooftop idea gains
appeal from this angle because of the ability to see more at any one time.
Likewise with some kind of flying vehicle. However each of these have
their own problems as discussed above. Looks like some storylines will
have to deal with this.

Q: What about vehicles?

A. This is another bone I have to pick with traditional comic books.
The Batmobile may be fast and powerful, but radio and roadblocks would soon
bring it to heel. It's also quite distinctive and easy to pick out of
traffic. Also, while Batman may have an arrangment with the Gotham police
(or with the commissioner, at least), that arrangment would not likely keep the
FAA from taking a dim view on the various flying vehicles. And
high-performance jet aircraft? I think the Air Force would probably take a
hand here.

A more practical approach would be for Our Hero to have several cheap "econobox"
cars. Very undistinctive and looking just like thousands of other cars on
the road. Leave them untitled, unlicensed, and unregistered and pay cash
for their purchase in a private transaction and there's no way to trace them
back to their current owner. That means forging or stealing license
plates, which automatically makes Our Hero a minor criminal. It's not Our
Hero's place to chase after criminals. The car is simply a method of
getting around, maybe storing equipment without having to carry it on his
person. Stealth is paramount--invisibility by being so ordinary that
nobody thinks twice about it. It's just one more hatchback or minivan.

The other thing to consider is that even with all that "stealth"
the car might still be identified. Our Hero has to be able to abandon it
at any time. And since he's not a "millionaire playboy" that
means it has to be cheap.

So what have we got: several nondescript cars parked at various places
around town. By switching vehicles, and switching parking locations, he
avoids patterns that can be traced back to him.